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Custom hand SIZE- Additional insights and tips

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Mike Metcalf

Started a topic Thu, 14 Apr, 2016 at 10:11 PM

Hi,

I've seen some threads about custom hands being too big in videoscribe regardless of how big the image is. I think the question may not have been clearly resolved anywhere yet, and I've been confused about it too.

I did some testing and learned some things that may help you if you are having trouble with custom hands.

1) to reduce the number of variables that may affect the hand size in videoscribe, I have made all of my test images square (the width and height are the same). I recommend that you do the same until you get the results you want. Then you can fiddle with cropping things to different proportions if you wish.

2) your hand image doesn't necessarily have to be a particular size...4000 pixels square, or 3000 or 2000. If you usually make videos that are 1080p (HD) I would guess that 1080 pixelsx1080pixels would probably be a good size and anything larger might be overkill. But that's just a guess. For this experiment I made my images 800x800 pixels.

3) if your hand looks blurry, pixelated, ragged around the edges or otherwise crappy... it could be bad photography or sloppy photoshop work, but we'll have to sort that out in another thread. This thread deals mainly with sizing.

I started with a photo of my hand with the background removed and a dropshadow and a size of 800x800 pixels. I'm calling that the "large" hand.

Then I kept the image dimensions the same but I selected the hand and scaled it down to a smaller size (and badly painted in more of the arm). That is the "medium" hand

Then I scaled the hand down again (and added more badly drawn arm to fill in the empty space) for the "small" hand.

I'm attaching a video to show the results. I've pasted the three hand sizes on the canvas. They are smaller than actual size but you can see how they look compared to each other. Then I used the large medium and small hands to draw the words LARGE, MEDIUM, and SMALL respectively:

Please note that I did not make two different images for the up and down strokes (but you can do that of course). I just wanted to show how to make the hand smaller. If you make a smaller hand you'll probably want to photograph more of your arm instead of just painting it badly as I did.

It is a good idea to make the hand reach most of the way to the top of the image. If you just have a tiny hand in the lower right or left corner of the image, then when videoscribe draws with it, you'll see a chopped off hand without an arm moving about your screen.

Also note, there have been some bugs that may cause any hand to change sizes/become huge at some point during the scribe. It might be one of the zero-second bugs. I can't recall.

Hope that helps,Mike (videoscribe user)

Barry Radford

On Fri, 15 Apr, 2016 at 12:15 PM
Admin

Thanks Mike, as always a useful guide there!

We are looking seriously at putting some hand size control into a future version at the moment as well which would help with this.

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Dave Millman

On Wed, 20 Apr, 2016 at 5:33 AM

Nicely done, Mike!

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Signify Software

On Wed, 24 Aug, 2016 at 12:18 PM

Where can I download the existing hand samples in .png as to make them smaller and import them again?

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Mike Metcalf

On Wed, 24 Aug, 2016 at 1:36 PM

Hi,I don't believe that the built-in hands are available for download. This tutorial refers to custom hands that you can create using your own digital photographs.

-Mike (videoscribe user)

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ALISON LEESE

On Fri, 12 Oct, 2018 at 9:17 PM

FYI- there are various "hand / arm with chalk" options in Shutterstock if that is an option for you.

Too bad the zoom issue is still a "thing" v 3.2/ circa late 2018.

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ALISON LEESE

On Sat, 13 Oct, 2018 at 10:41 PM

OMG yall. So to make the hand small you MAKE THE HAND SMALL! I made a 300 x 275 ish image with a 60 x 75 ish HAND in the center of image (ish), ,and now my hand does not zoom!- and looks like a realistic hand size that would be drawing on my (realistic) chalkboard. If you are trying to achieve something similar I hope this info helps you!!

Barry Radford

On Tue, 16 Oct, 2018 at 11:18 AM
Admin

Hey Alison, if you want to share your creation with others you can use that hand in a scribe project (can just be a little piece of text or one Library image) then export it and attach it to a forum post then others can download and import it. That will add your hand to their recently used options.

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Dave Millman

On Wed, 17 Oct, 2018 at 1:24 AM

Here are some hands I made for a project that needed a set of many colors plus erasers several years ago. They should be large enough to resize if necessary. I have really huge versions (4752 × 3168) if anyone needs those.